Front Burner - Inside the die-hard camp at Fairy Creek

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

Old-growth logging at B.C.’s Fairy Creek watershed has been temporarily deferred, but activists aren’t leaving the blockades. CBC reporter Kieran Oudshoorn brings us an inside look at the hardest-to-access Fairy Creek protest camp — and why activists are staying put.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Come on under here. Come over here, my relatives. Come on, quickly. Who are you serving and protecting? How about a hug? It's got to be a tough day going against yourselves like this, eh?

Since August of last year, activists in southern Vancouver Island have been blocking the logging company Teal Jones from constructing a road into the Ferry Creek watershed, one of the last unlogged watersheds on Vancouver Island. They call themselves the Rainforest Flying Squad, and they're worried that the road would not only disrupt this fragile ecosystem, but also make it easier to log at the headwaters in the future. They started with one camp, which became three camps, and now it's hard to even say how many there are. After the RCMP began enforcing an injunction against the protesters in mid-May, more than 200 people have been arrested, many of them multiple times. And still, they keep going back. I've never been so excited to be arrested. I tied myself into this tube in the ground, and so I'm kind of stuck here until they get me out, basically. Do you see this type of violence that's being used around here?

Let go of her now! Until old-growth logging stops, until we start to have more respect for the land and respect for the people of the land, this isn't going to go anywhere. The Ferry Creek blockades are part of a fight over old-growth logging that's been going on for three decades in BC. And those who want it stopped have leveled heavy criticism against the BC NDP government for maintaining the status quo. The conflict has also spotlighted the complex relationship over logging within indigenous communities. Two weeks ago, the BC government agreed to defer old growth logging in the area

for two years, but the protesters are still on the blockades and they're still getting arrested. CBC reporter Kieran Oudshorn has been covering this story for the past year, and he recently spent three days in bedded with protesters at Ridge Camp. It's the original and most remote of all these blockades, near the headwaters of Ferry Creek. Hey, Kieran, thank you so much for being here today. It's great to have you on to the podcast. Hey, good morning, Jamie.

So for starters, can you tell me how you got to Ridge Camp and the kind of landscape you went through to get there? Sure. So maybe I should start off by giving you a little bit of the geography of this space. So if you were to go into Google Maps and search for Port Renfrew, it's going to take you to the southwest corner of Vancouver Island. And if you switch to the satellite mode, you're going to see a sort of a patchwork pattern on the hills around Port Renfrew. And that's from all the logging that's been taking place over the last, you know, half decade or a few decades or so. And just above Port Renfrew, though, there's this one little patch, this valley that is all green.

It's shaped a little bit like a leaf, and it really stands out because it hasn't been logged, and that's what's at the center of all this. This is the Ferry Creek Watershed. And the place that I was headed to is the Ridge Camp, which is situated just on the top northwest corner of that watershed, and it's the headwaters for the creek. And to get there, I had to drive behind the activist lines because, as you mentioned in your intro, there's a lot of blockades now.

There's a bunch of different camps that are set up all over the place, and I had to drive behind these lines up into the hills, and then from there, I had to put on a pack and put all my gear into it and hike up along the ridges to get to this camp. It took two hours to hike in. It was incredibly steep and muddy and slippery, but also just incredibly spectacular because what you're hiking through along these ridges is just a really rare ecosystem.

It's so rare that most people don't get access to it or aren't going to see these. And so you're hiking through this old growth forest. There's yellow cedars and hemlocks. And even at these high elevations, way up on these ridges, these trees are huge. They're rising hundreds of feet into the air. And to wrap your arms around it would take four or five people just to get their arms around one tree and and it's really incredibly beautiful because in the morning the the mist sort of rolls in off the ocean uh and it's sort of filtering through

the forest and the light comes down and you feel kind of like you're in a soft box there's this otherworldly glow and there's this silence that just it permeates everything it's just so quiet you know there's the birds at night there's the silence that just it permeates everything it's just so quiet you know there's the birds at night there's the hooting of owls but it's just such a quiet place uh and i was hiking through um i had an escort, a guide, this guy who was using, everyone there has camp names, and his camp name was Karst.

And so as we were hiking through, it was really quiet until that silence was broken by something that has now become very regular up there as well, which is these police helicopters. They come in twice a day to scope everything out, and they were flying in super low near where we were. Wow, look at that. Holy.

It almost seems like they're getting more rays, and they're coming down a lot lower now. So then you finally, you make it to ridge camp, and can you describe what's going on at the camp? Who's there? What are they doing? And I guess let's just talk first about what's happening on the ground. Sure. So the camp itself, there's maybe like, you know, 10 or 15 people there who are, you know, staying overnight.

They have sort of their tents are set up in the forest. They're sort of dotting the area. They have a little kitchen area and a campfire. It's good use of chopsticks. Did you go to the house or something? sort of dotting the area. They have a little kitchen area and a campfire. It's a good use of chopsticks. Did you guys eat lunch or something? I thought you threw me in the fire. I was like, not again!

A lot of the conflict that's happening right now with the police, a lot of the arrests and whatnot, that's happening further down the road at some of the camps that are lower down that are blocking access to this camp. So the atmosphere in this camp was actually pretty relaxed when I was there. People were pretty chilled. They're helping build out infrastructure. And then I was going to do the next line into that hemlock that's there. But we can go into the woods if we want. They're putting in new

tree sits and other hard blocks. And they're also sort of building the sense of camaraderie. The day that I was there, some people showed up. They'd hiked in a bunch of rebar to help reinforce some of these positions, as well as cheese curds. And so everyone was like, OK, great, we're going to make poutine tonight. And we're all sitting around this campfire. Yeah, no, it was very cute, hilarious. We were sitting around this campfire. They're trying to fry up potatoes.

How's the sauce coming in today? It's beautiful. Very saucy. You know, one guy's playing a banjo and we're just watching the sunset. And so it's quite picturesque sometimes, this one. I'm just like going, having to do the long trek in to get through there. It was a long trek in to get through there. We saw deer gather occasionally, people from haikus or haikus or whatever. Sounds great, Lou. You mentioned hard blocks. Tell me what those are.

Right. So the activists are trying to slow down the police, and they're trying to do it in these nonviolent ways. And so in order to do that, they want their arrests when they get arrested to take as long as possible. So they have a variety of different contraptions that they've come up with to slow down those arrests. And one of the ones that they've been using over and over again, they call the sleeping dragon. And what they do is they dig a hole in the road, then they pour concrete and put a PVC pipe with chains in it into the concrete, let it set, put the earth back on top, and then what someone does is they lay down on the road and they put their arm

into the pipe and they chain themselves into the pipe. So the police can't just pull them out. What they have to do instead is they have to dig up the road, then they have to break through the concrete, then they have to cut open the PVC pipe, and then they have to snip off the chain. And that all takes, you know, can take an hour, two hours to get just one person out of one of these blocks, and they have to use heavy machinery.

They're using, you know, jackhammers, and they used a backhoe incredibly close, It can take an hour, two hours to get just one person out of one of these blocks. And they have to use heavy machinery. They're using, you know, jackhammers. And they used a backhoe incredibly close, like a foot away from someone's head as they're trying to dig them out of these spaces. And they have even crazier things. Like one guy had a sailboat mast that he had cantilevered out over this gorge, you know, like a 50-foot drop. And he had counterbalanced the weight with a car. And he was sitting way out at the end of it. And it took the police literally days for them to figure out how to get him off from that. So they're using a variety of these different methods to slow down the arrests.

Wow, wow. That just made me feel a bit nauseous. I'm a little bit scared of heights. But that does sound quite intense. So that is what is happening on the ground, but there's another part of the camp way, way above the ground. And you mentioned before also tree sets, right? Yeah, that's right. So they've set up these anchors way up in these ancient trees, you know, 50, 60 feet off the ground.

And then they've raised platforms. And in one case, they actually raised a small dinghy, a small boat up into the tree. And then people are living on these platforms. They have tarps. They have food supplies. You know, they're out there with their harnesses and everything. How are you feeling up there? Good, yeah.

It's just such a beautiful day to be up here. Wow, it's so beautiful to see you up there. That's such a sacred place to be, hey? Yeah, surrounded in tarp yeah living in the lichen and the idea is that if they are up there they're hard to extract and also they are stopping so you can't fell you can't follow these trees you can't cut them down or continue road construction and so that's a big part of what they're doing as well as they they are constantly putting up more and more of these tree sits and it's really wild how they do it they have sort of two approaches one is that

like sometimes they'll just free climb uh these ancient trees which is mind-boggling uh and then tie in the ropes i mean they don't have hr like i had hr i had to go through risk assessment to just hike up there along these guys um and then they also have like these slingshots yeah yeah no it was, it was a whole thing. And then they also have these six-foot slingshots that they're using to fire lines into the trees so that they can hike up to them and then pull the different trees that stop. So there's maybe six or seven of them at Ridge Camp, but they're putting up new ones all the time. So I suggest maybe we walk on the left side there and sort of bushwhack a little bit, but then we can get to the burger end there, and then we can just pick a couple of trees.

Are we thinking of the idea of the hanging platform and then the third one, just a line going from there, sleeping on the rocks in the center? Wow. Okay, and as someone who's not a huge fan of heights, they actually sleep up there. They sleep up there, right? Yeah, no, it is actually incredible. Some people are spending all their time up there. One of the main activists, one of the people who's really central to this whole story is this woman named Shauna Knight.

And she is staying in one of these tree sits near, at Ridge Camp. It's in a hemlock. She's maybe 50 feet off the ground, right near the camp. The reason I chose that hemlock was because it was right in the middle of the road building. They still have to hit that to complete the roads. So it's blocking the way. And the platform she's on is just, you know, like it's like what, maybe like four feet by eight feet. It's just a small little ledge. And she was telling me...

At first, sure, it was a little bit, like, unnerving, but now I don't even have a harness on up there anymore. I don't sleep with the harness on. Yeah. You just kind of get comfortable and you understand, like, and trust that this ancient hundred, hundred, hundred-year-old tree

is going to protect you hold you i do yeah i'm a side sleeper so i go back and forth and back and forth i would be so scared i mean like i guess you just get used to it it kind of sags in the middle like a little bit you know what i mean like so you kind of have this little cradle but you get used to it wow yeah i was shocked too i was like i would not do that i'm worried when i sleep on my bed I mean, like, so you kind of have this little cradle, but you get used to it. Wow. Yeah, I was shocked too. I was like, I would not do that. I'm worried when I sleep on my bed.

I had a bunk bed when I was a kid and I was always worried I was going to fall off that thing. 100%, 100%. Okay. So this woman, Shauna Knight, I understand she's one of the main organizers of the Rainforest Flying Squad, right? And can you tell me more about her? Yeah. So Shauna was one of the people who Flying Squad, right? And can you tell me more about her? Yeah. So Shauna was one of the people who was there last year. She's a mother of two teens. She's in her early 40s.

She's a cancer survivor. And in August of last year, when they were sort of like her and a bunch of other old-growth activists were looking at some of this satellite imagery, they saw this logging road being built into Ferry Creek, and so she decided that she had to go out and join them. And she's actually also an entrepreneur. She had a food truck that she ran out of Souk and she sold her truck to go and spend all of this time out at the camp where she's at. In fact, she headed out there like right after her last surgery from cancer, which was wild. Came out to the blockade three weeks later and decided this would be a

good place for me to learn and heal and be a part of something that I felt pretty passionate about. Yeah, I healed here in this forest at this camp. So Shauna is also a mixed Norwegian and Sequoic heritage. She told me that this was an important part of her identity, but something that she'd been estranged from for most of her life. Sequoic being a First Nation here in BC, it's around near Kamloops and sort of the interior. And Shauna's maternal grandmother went to residential school, but she'd lost that connection.

And she was saying that being, you know, in this tree set, being on these blockades, you know, her activism here and engaging with different First Nations had been sort of a big part of a personal reconciliation for her. I'm pretty disconnected from my culture due to my mother suffering the childhood of what that looked like. And then intergenerational trauma that, you know, comes with all that. So I'm learning things about my culture, and I'm connecting to things I didn't even understand,

and coming into a lot of learning and a lot of discovering, like about my family and where I'm from and where I belong and what my purpose is and how I can be of best use and what my obligations and responsibilities are to the can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share

with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. podcast, just search for Money for Cops. Okay, this seems like a good time to note that these blockades are on the territory of the Pachidot First Nation, but a majority of the protesters are non-Indigenous. And I understand that within the Pachidot community, there are quite strong

divisions about whether the protesters should be there or not. And can you tell me about that? Right. So the Pachidat are really important, but also quite complicated part of this story. To start, they're quite a small nation, just about 280 members. And as you mentioned, the Ferry Creek watershed and a lot of where these blockades are taking place are taking place on their traditional territory. And the Pachita, the elected chief and council, they've signed a revenue-sharing agreement with the province that allows them to share in some of the stumbage fees that Teal Jones pays. And they also have three mills on their territory. So logging and, in fact, even old-growth logging has been a part of their economy for a number of years.

But the complication comes when we start to think about who speaks for the Pachita. I mean, like any community, people don't always agree. Like any family, people don't always agree. And that's definitely the case here. And on the one hand, you have the elected chief, Jeff Jones, and you have a hereditary chief, Frank Cuisto Jones. They've signed statements. They've said, you know, they've asked the activists to leave their territory and to not interfere. But then on the other hand, you have this incredibly outspoken elder,

Pachydet elder Bill Jones, and you have the young but yet to be seated hereditary chief, Victor Peter. And they both oppose logging in the territory, or at least old growth logging in the territory, say that they've invited the Rainforest Flying Squad and other activists to be on their territory. They've both been on the blockades. They've led some of the protests. And Bill Jones has said, has talked about how specifically the area of Ferry Creek has been really important

to him and his family for spiritual purposes. They go up and bathe there and how he wants to see it protected. It's rather odd that we do things like this in our lives. It's a three and a half hour walk up there. And my brother and I used to separately walk up there. So it's sort of like now looking back in my younger manhood, I walked three-and-a-half hours to go to church, you know? It's interesting because the strength with which Bill Jones has approached

his vocal sort of pushback on this stands in pretty stark contrast to the relative silence from other members of his First Nation. And that might have something to do with the fact that the revenue sharing agreement that the Pachidat have signed with the province stipulates that their members can't interfere with provincial approved login activity. And I actually talked to Bill Jones. I've managed to interview him a number of times over the last 10 months. And I've asked him about this, like why there aren't more members of his nation that are engaging with some of these protests. And the answer that he gave me was that, you know, a lot of times when communities are

facing poverty, and he was specifically talking about colonialism and how, you know, Indigenous communities have faced a lot of friction around that, that often they will cling to, you know, indigenous communities have faced a lot of friction around that, that often they will cling to, you know, whatever economic outputs they can. And that's what Bill says is happening here. And it's a difficult situation because Bill Jones argues that, you know, the elected chief doesn't speak for everyone and that it's a product of the Indian Act system. And in fact, this is true. When you look at the Indian Act, you know, they have a chief counsel system that's required if you want to access federal funding. And so a lot of communities, when I've done reporting in First Nations communities,

there's a lot of friction that can exist between traditional governance structures and structures that are mandated by the Indian Act system. And Bill Jones, he says that's what's going on here. The federal government set this political system up on reserves that entrenched an unfair advantage to the band councils. And when I reached out to speak to Jeff Jones, he wasn't available to talk to me, and he hasn't sat down and talked with us at any point in the last 10 months when I've been working on these stories. Right, right. And I know that this is its own unique situation, but there are certainly some parallels here to what we saw last year with the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs who did not want

a pipeline going through their territory, but the elected band council had approved that pipeline. Yeah, I think that there's a rising awareness among Canadians about how there's different governing structures and how they sort of play out and play against each other in First Nations. Okay, so that is what is happening with the Indigenous community there. And then there's also the BC NDP government. So, of course, the fight over old growth logging in BC is a very old one. And I mean, a lot of people have pointed out the similarities between these Ferry Creek protests and the Clackawatt Sound protests back in 1993. The locals have lately been joined by celebrities

and environmental activists from away who hope to turn the cause into an international story. So far this summer, about 500 people have stood their ground to be arrested for contempt of court. Trees take root and trees die. And I pass this torch on to the next generation. And in the B.C. election last October, leader John Horgan campaigned on a promise to finally change this, right? The report that came to us that we commissioned to look at how we could manage old growth going forward, it will result in the deferment of 353,000 hectares of old growth forest into the future. I think that's a positive plan. We need to consult with Indigenous peoples

because at the end of the day, the land that our forests are on ultimately belongs to them. He said his government would overhaul how forests are managed in BC. And he's faced a ton of criticism this year from people who say his government isn't fulfilling that promise. And what I'm wondering is this, Karen, like, why does this continue to be an issue now? People have been fighting for over 30 years over this. Like, why not just harvest second growth trees? Just leave these old growth trees alone. Yeah, well, I think that's a question that a lot of people are asking. I mean, I think that the answer, I mean, there's a lot of answers. And I'm not sure that I have all the solutions or anything. But I think that one of

the major answers is money. And on a couple different fronts. The first is that, you know, old growth lumber, generally per cubic meter is actually just worth a lot more. There's, you know, it's bigger, it has a higher quality. There's oftentimes more that you can gather. Sometimes it's two to three times more with per cubic meter than second growth. And then another issue that we have is that a lot of second growth in the province actually hasn't matured yet. And so the industry, people within the industry and foresters say that if the industry wants to, you know, like still exist in five to ten years, that it needs to be harvesting old growth now in order to do that in the interim. In fact, we've seen actually an increase in the number of cut blocks that have been applied for

that are old growth. Now, forestry is a huge part of the BC economy. You know, there's employees about 50,000 people. It's a big part of our exports here. You know, industry groups have said that 38,000 people work directly or are working directly related to old growth, harvesting in the territory. So it's a big part of what's happening economically in the province. And so shifting that would be a large shift. But there are some changes that are coming. The government, as you mentioned, they've made some promises to follow up on recommendations that were put out in an old growth strategic review that are asking for a paradigm shift in how we sort of do forest management. The question really is sort of what the timetable is for that and how much old growth is going to be logged while they're making these changes. And then there has been some action on the Ferry Creek story on June 9th, right? And so what happened there?

Right. So actually, if we back up two days, on June 7th, the Pachydet, along with their neighboring nations of the Dittydat and the Huayat, they all put together a joint statement asking for a deferment of old growth logging for two years at the Ferry Creek watershed and in the central Walbrand until they could development a resource stewardship plan for those lands. But they also were very explicit that all other log-in activity that had already been approved, they wanted that to go ahead. So they asked for that on June 7th, and then two days later, the province said, yes, we're going to grant that.

We're going to do a deferment just for these specific areas of the Ferry Creek Watershed, quite limited, and then also for the central Walvern. Okay, and what have the protesters said about that? Because I understand that they're not going anywhere, right? They're staying put. Yeah, it's just to get us out of here. It's just a buy time.

They're staying put. Yeah, well, I mean, and so that's the issue is the First Nations asked for all other logging to go ahead. The protesters, they say that their protests are about more than just one watershed. And they're about more things than just logging. They're also about this road building, which they say is disruptive and destructive and is going to lead to logging down

the road. Right now, we're blocking road construction and the road construction through here has already been approved. And their statement was that anything that's already approved to not stand in the way of it which means that the road construction can still be built through here and so because this announcement didn't include a wider deferment of more of this land because this announcement didn't include a pause on road building uh the the activists say that they're not going anywhere, that they're going to stay in their tree sits,

they're going to stay in their sleeping dragons, they're going to stay in their camps on the ridge sides and hold the line for as long as they can. All right. Karen, thank you so much for this. Thank you. Hey, Jamie, I really appreciate you taking time to chat with me. So Kieran also wrote a web feature about his time at Ridge Camp.

The photos are totally amazing. They look just like paintings. You can find a link to that story at cbc.ca slash frontburner. And some news before we go. Yesterday, the Cowissus First Nation in Saskatchewan announced it has located hundreds of unmarked burial sites near a former residential school. About three weeks ago, the nation began using radar to scan the area surrounding the Maryville Indian Residential School. The school operated from 1899 to 1997. In a statement, the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations said that, quote, the number of unmarked graves will be the most significantly substantial to date in Canada.

We'll keep you updated on the story. substantial to date in Canada. We'll keep you updated on the story. Meantime, the National Indian Residential School Crisis Line has been set up to provide support to former residential school students and others affected. You can call them 24 hours a day at 1-866-925-4419. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow.